For example, in a recent Gallup poll, taken at the request of the Religious Education Association of the United States and Canada (see The Gallup Organization, Inc., The Development of the Adult Life Cycle, Module 1), some 1,042 people were asked, among other things, to choose between four different “definitions” of faith. A full fifty-one percent of those who answered felt that “a relationship with God” best described what they meant by faith. Twenty percent thought of faith as “finding a meaning in life.” Another nineteen percent understood faith to mean “a set of beliefs,” but only four percent associated faith as necessarily involving “membership in a church or synagogue.” (Of the remainder, five percent had no answer to the question and a slim one percent declared that faith was not meaningful as far as they were concerned.)
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Given these various ideas about what faith means to people today, it seems only logical to try to trace the reason ‘or such a wide variety of opinions. To do this, I’m going to turn briefly to the work of a modern Catholic theologian, Avery Dulles, S.J.
Models of Faith
In his essay, “The Changing Forms of Faith” (see A. Dulles, The Survival of Dogma, pp. 17-31) Dulles gives us what amounts to seven variations in the understanding of he word faith down through history.
(1) ‘Emunah in the Hebrew scriptural sense denotes that we generally think of as faithfulness or “loyalty” or “steadfastness” today. This faith, however, has to be understood primarily in the context of God’s faithfulness to his covenant or promises to his chosen people-thus their fidelity to God in return.
(2) Pistis in the New Testament, in view of its background in the Hebrew scriptures, includes this same idea of God’s faithfulness to his promises and our faithfulness in return. But now this faithfulness has a new focus, and particularly in the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) the term pistis or “faith” means a loving trust in God’s power working through Jesus. There is, however, a further development in a doctrinal direction in the various other New Testament writings, particularly the later Pauline ‘pastoral” epistles.
(3) Early Christian faith emphasized the enlightenment of humanity that was made possible through the revelation in Christ. In a sense, this early Christian understanding of faith was a continuation and expansion of the idea of faith already found in the gospel of John where Jesus is depicted as the “truth” and the “light of the world.” This emphasis on “enlightenment” was highlighted by the then common reference to baptism as “illumination” and could be best
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understood in St. Anselm’s famous phrase “I believe so that I may understand.”
(4) Medieval faith continued the early Christian tradition, but with an increased emphasis on the body of doctrine or so-called “deposit of faith” that did not so much enlighten or expand the possibilities of human knowledge, but entirely surpasses it. Yet paradoxically, the scholastic theologians also subjected this doctrine to the scrutiny of human logic to a degree unheard of before and scarcely rivaled since. It was almost as if they were trying to turn Augustine’s saying upside down or inside out and make every belief fully explainable by human reason.
(5) Reformation (Protestant) faith represents a strong reaction to the excesses of the later medieval scholars. The reformers, especially Luther, stressed faith as being primarily a complete trust in the saving grace earned by Christ on the cross. For this, Luther relied primarily on St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans (as well as the epistle to the Galatians) where Paul reacts strongly against the Pharisees’ notion of faith as mostly a matter of a painstaking keeping of the ancient law. To various degrees, all the reformation churches adopted Luther’s motto of “Scripture alone, Faith alone, Grace alone.”
(6) The Catholic counter-reformation stressed faith as the adherence to the “deposit of faith” (as understood by medieval theology) but with the old emphasis on understanding replaced by a new emphasis on acceptance of the church’s teaching authority (not just that of the Bible alone), along with the performance of good works (against reliance on “grace alone”). This same approach was stressed again, but with renewed emphasis on the “reasonableness” of faith, at the First Vatican Council in 1870 to combat the rise of the modern sciences and the growing “modernist” ideas that faith is an irrational human “sentiment” or expression of a “religious impulse.” But the earlier counter-reform emphasis
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on authority expressed at the Council of Trent still comes out on top even in the Vatican I statement used as the model of our old catechism definition:
Faith is that supernatural virtue by which , through the help of God and through the assistance of His Grace, we believe what He has revealed to be true, not [on account of] the intrinsic truth perceived by the natural light of reason, but because of the authority of God Himself, the Revealer, who can neither deceive or be deceived. (Session 3, Chapter 3).
(7) Existential faith, much discussed in our time, stresses the “leap of faith” or act of trust in God. It is not unlike Luther’s idea of faith, but without his certainty in the infallibility of the Bible and with a strong emphasis on a commitment to human betterment that is not so evident from complete reliance on “grace alone.”
Since the time of World War II, the lived experience of faith, even for Catholics, has shifted more and more in this existentialist” direction. Vatican II, although endorsing the definition of faith given at Vatican I, has taken a more favorable view of the non-rational “fideism” that Vatican I so feared. This “religious sense” or impulse has, to some extent, been recognized and re-understood more positively by the theologians and bishops of Vatican II as being at the core of the human quest. This quest is, even in the atheistic dreams of a materialistic paradise, a testimony to the unseen work of the Holy Spirit drawing the human soul to God (see The Church in the Modern World,” especially sections 10 and 22). If such existential longings are not “faith” in any actual sense of the word, they are the soil in which the seeds of faith can be planted, take root, and grow. To the precisely nuanced definition of Vatican I, the fathers of Vatican II an additional emphasis, not so much on an obedience
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to the teaching of the church, but on an obedience to the impulse or grace of faith itself, “the obedience of faith . . . by which a man commits his whole self freely to God” (Vatican II, “Constitution on Divine Revelation,” Section 5).
Before passing on from this historical overview of the various meanings of faith, I think we should also have a look at the one spot in the New Testament where something of a definition of faith is given. “Faith,” says the writer of the epistle to the Hebrews (11:1), “is confident assurance concerning what we hope for, the conviction about things we do not see” (The New American Bible translation). The New Jerusalem Bible, on the other hand, translates this passage as: “Only faith can guarantee the blessings that we hope for, or prove the existence of the realities that remain unseen.”
If the basic meaning of these two versions may seem close, the precise translation of the key words, hypostasis and elegchos, are the subject of much debate. If some, like The Jerusalem Bible translators, see them better translated as “guarantee” and “proof,” others, as in the New American translation, understand them in less objective terms and more descriptive of the believer’s state of mind. In terms of the models of faith given above, what we have here is a clash between what seems to be a Catholic emphasis on objective content (what is believed) and a Protestant emphasis on confidence (or how we believe). Yet both are Catholic translations of the Bible. But given the general context of the rest of the chapter